West Texas Oil Drilling Is Booming — No Surprise
We just returned from four days of hiking in Big Bend National Park, and today we drove 500 miles in Texas along I-10. A number of oil wells were pumping vigorously along the highway. When we took the...
View ArticleThe Upside of Procrastination
The free newspaper on the London tube has this front-page advertisement: “From 10 a.m. tomorrow, £10 ($15) hotel rooms, on the web site lastminute.com.” For an economist this is a heartwarming...
View ArticleWhy My Wife Doesn't Cook Dinner
We teach that people make decisions comparing marginal benefit to marginal cost. We labor economists apply this to decisions about work, telling students to compare the return (the wage) to the...
View ArticlePoor Economics in an Economics Department
Three weeks until classes start, including my 500-student section of micro principles. Unlike in past semesters, I won’t be assigned any smart undergrads to lead review sessions. Budgets are limited,...
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The Marginal Cost of the McRib
Photo: IRuocaled McDonald’s has reintroduced its McRib sandwich. Consisting of meat that at one point belonged to a pig, it is now on yet another farewell tour, its sixth since 2004. (Actually, the...
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Staffing the Park Gates
Eight years ago I blogged about a trip up to Haleakala National Park in Maui, noticing that at 9:45AM the National Park Service didn’t bother staffing the entry gate, thus not collecting the entry...
View ArticleMarginal Cost of the 26th Naked Actor
An English newspaper reports that an opera producer has had to cut back the number of naked male actors from 88 to 25 for fear that, given the size of the stage, some of the naked actors would fall...
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